Tag: cash money

The year-end post, circa 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[Originally written on December 9th, but held off until end of year due to personal neuroticism]

Today, I took a half day off work.  I originally wanted to take a full day off on account of the fact that I’m sitting on nearly six days’ worth of PTO hours that I haven’t used, and my company has a use it or lose it policy, and I’m more than likely going to take an L on some hours.  But the way I see it, or at least the way I try to rationalize it to myself is that it’s a little bit of give and take on the sick hours, since there’s probably been several days in which I should’ve just taken the day, but I “worked from home” on those days but whatever, I took a half day off when I wanted to take a full day off, primarily because there was a big monthly meeting at 8 fucking AM that I felt that I needed to attend because I had several projects being shown and it was probably for the best that I be there.

So, as far as the rest of my day went, instead of punting and logging on from home after the 8 AM meeting, I decided to just head into the office since I tend to be more productive there.  And yes, I was pretty productive in the two hours that I was there, determined to hard stop at 11:45, but the dearth of work I’ve had throughout the year has been pretty mundane and often aggravating in nature, mostly because most all the work is like that at my company because of project management that can’t ever seem to stabilize due to rapid employee churn and turnover.

Plus, there were some concerning layoffs that happened a week prior, and naturally everyone at the office is on high-alert and on their best behavior, lest they become victims of another spontaneous workforce reduction initiative.

Anyway, I left the office and headed down toward the vicinity of the airport because I have to pick mythical wife up, and everyone knows just how much fun a trip to Atlanta Hartsfield Latoya Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Hot Wing Express is, even for a pick-up job, but I saw it as an opportunity to at least treat myself to some Willy’s and loaf in the parking lot to do my daily Duolingo.

But by the time I get back from the airport, any chance at any sort of personal endeavors are pretty much gone, since my kids are just getting off school, and despite being off the clock, there’s another meeting that I felt that I should at least listen in on because again, tryna be indispensable.

So, I try to be productive with my day, since I’m a weird fuck who finds satisfaction in productivity, despite it being completely counter-culture to the notion of taking PTO in order to relax.  But since I’m off the clock, I take the time to set up some outdoor Christmas decorating that fell to the wayside because of all the babysitting I’ve had to do for my dad, being under the weather a week ago, and that I just generally never have any fucking time.

I get the lights set up, and then I come inside and set up the second Christmas tree, which sounds like a complete waste of time setting up a second one, but y’all need to understand that this is my tree, aptly called the jihad tree, because it is cheap and small, but it houses all of the tacky and fun and ridiculous and mostly broken and unwanted Christmas ornaments that I’ve been accumulating over the years.  I love this tree and what it represents, and it’s important to me that it goes up and gets its time to shine and display as much as the show tree does.

And then it’s time to get dinner prepped for the kids, and the point of all this is that despite the fact that I took a half day off, absolutely zero minutes of my entire day were really spent in any sort of blow off, fuck responsibility kind of way that PTO should be spent on, and such is kind of a snapshot of just about every day of my life, in 2025, as well as god knows how much longer since.

I had to actually stop and think about it, how I felt about how the year has gone, because I really don’t always have the time to stop and think about things unless they’re usually critical, but I think it’s safe to say that as a whole, 2025 really has stunk.  Yes, I know how curmudgeon and pessimistic that sounds, which is probably what most people think of my personal brand being, but when I stop and think about the general day-to-day and minutiae of living in 2025, and very little of it is notably good.

I’m stressed out and depressed more often than I’m not, and every single day I feel taken for granted, ignored, taken for granted, deprioritized and of course, taken for granted.  I always feel as I have to hard carry the vast majority of aspects of my life, nobody helps out, everyone takes but nobody gives.  I have to take care of everyone, and nobody ever seems to be available to take care of me.

A tremendous amount of angst stems from my financial position, and I genuinely can’t remember ever being in as much debt in my entire life as I am now.  Absolutely nothing I do can dig out of the holes that I’m falling deeper and deeper into, and just when I manage to feel like I get a win somewhere in my finances, something inevitably always shows up and I end up in a worse position than I was previously.  Again, nobody is helping me, and everyone around me is making things worse, and I know it sounds shitty to say, but families are fucking expensive, and I feel like nobody is willing to make any sacrifices or changes in my world except for me, and it shows, because I’m living paycheck to paycheck right now and not doing a very good job of keeping my head above water and this has a massive bearing to my general state of being.

In fact, it was just a few days ago in which I was having a completely normal day without incident, but then I got that ticket in the mail that was a $1,000 fine.  Something I didn’t do, but still something that I am responsible for rectifying.  And then to add insult to injury, there was a $6,500 expense that I was not expecting to show up, just the following day.

I’m not suicidal, but it was definitely one of those moments where I wanted to say that I wanted to just blow my head off, because this shit is fucking ridiculous.

But this really was the pivotal moment in which I realized, man, 2025 really has fucking blew.  And usually I end up writing my year-end post closer to the New Year, but honestly I don’t think three fucking weeks left in the month is going to change anything because I basically have had to cancel Christmas because of $7,500 out the window that I have no earthly idea how I’m going to pay it.

On top of feeling like one of the world’s biggest punching bags is the babysitting I’ve been doing for my dad, in trying to get him to move down to Georgia.  If it’s not clear, I live a tremendously high-stress life as it is, but adding him and all of his resistant to change bullshit and communication issues because he never learned any fucking English and my parents never pushed me to learn more Korean, has really done a number to my health this year.

I’m 43, but for the first time in my life, I’ve really felt old, with my hereditary blood pressure issues seemingly escalating, presumably from all the increases in stress, leading to signs of feeling old like deteriorating eyesight, increased bathroom usage, and tension headaches.  And again, I know what all my stressors are, but nobody in my world seems to give a fuck about remotely helping me, so I’m just left feeling like I’m on an island, getting worse on a daily basis.

Needless to say, I know how dismal and insufferable this post must come off, if any of my zero readers has managed to make it this far.  I know I’m not alone in the world in feeling depression, despair and a general dissatisfaction with life.  I love my family and my kids, and they still manage to bring occasional moments of peace and happiness, handfuls they can all be at times.  But on an overall aggregate state of being scorecard, I’ve been pretty miserable all throughout 2025, and what really sucks is that I’m not sure how much better things are really going to get in the ensuing year, because a lot of the things that are killing me now, probably aren’t going to be going away any time soon in the future either.

One day at a time, I guess.  Try and enjoy little things, and try to not drag too many people down with my actual sourness and hide it behind a mask and keep more of my true thinking to the brog that nobody fucking reads.

Good lord, man.  I just want everything to get better, but I just don’t know if, when or how that’s ever going to happen sometimes.

Dad Brog (#159): PSA to parents of students

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is probably a little bit of a stretch as far as classifying this as a dad brog, but my kids are students and have teachers, and obviously mythical wife is a teacher and deals with kids and whatever, this is a dad brog, fucking deal with it

But back to the subject of this post, this is a PSA to all parents of students, specifically those who wish to get holiday gifts for their children’s teachers:

Stop buying mugs and candles.

Unless your children’s teacher is celebrating their very first holiday season as a teacher, it’s safe to assume that they already have no less than four holiday mugs and three scented candles, most likely from Yankee Candle or Bath & Body Works.  Otherwise, multiply these numbers by the number of years in which said teacher has been teaching, and that’s how many fucking mugs and candles exist in their homes.

And if the teachers are anything like mythical wife, they have no earthly idea on how to remove them from their domiciles, so they end up accumulating and taking up space, and I, as a teacher’s spouse, end up creeping closer and closer to a breakdown from our house slowly descending into becoming an episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive, covered in so much cliché crap that is pawned off onto my wife under the guise of being in the spirit of the holidays.

This goes quadruple for my wife, who has the olfactory abilities of Wolverine, so she’s extremely sensitive to scents and therefore doesn’t like 80% of the candles given to her because they’re wonky and smell weird or bad, and they never get used, and currently just exist in a giant stack behind our Keurig.  And she doesn’t drink or even like coffee, so any mugs that comes with a coffee mix or a Starbucks gift card is pretty much lost on her, even though I like it when she bequeaths any Starbucks gift cards to me, the accumulation of yet another mug makes it not worth it.

Yes, I understand that any form of gifts to teachers are voluntary and are given with the best of intentions, and I’m not trying to put a kibosh on my wife from getting free shit with thoughtful intentions.  It’s just I’m challenging all other parents to be better and be aware that the teachers of their kids more than likely have a ton of fucking mugs and candles, and they are probably long past no longer welcome, even if they’re not allowed to say it.

Gift cards are always welcome, even if weirdos like mythical wife don’t drink coffee, thus making Starbucks ones pretty useless, but places like Target, whatever grocery chains are nearby, or even the American Express ones that nobody likes to buy because they’re usually an activation fee included on those.  Chick Fil-A, or whatever chain joints are around the area are welcome, and of course, Amazon.

Baked goods, be it completely homemade, or shit purchased from the local grocer or commercial bakeries are always welcome.  Snacks or treats in general are pretty welcome, but always a risk, not knowing what dietary restrictions the teacher may or may not have.

Failing all else, holiday cards, with just nice messages or greetings are welcome and superior to moar mugs or candles.

The point is, please please please stop buying teachers mugs and candles for Christmas.  It makes me think that these are cruel re-gifts, or were add-ons from larger purchases, that these parents are cleverly disguising as unique gifts for the educators of their children, with passive hopes that getting in their favor will prove beneficial to their children in the future.  Obviously I’m not the teacher in my house, but if I were, and I sniffed out a potential re-gift, yeah, it might influence my attitude towards their kid; but not in the way that they had hoped for.

Just like my attitude towards gift giving over the recent years, if you can’t give a thoughtful gift with genuine intention, don’t feel obligated to get one.  It’s better to give no gift, than a shitty thoughtless one, and I’d personally rather receive nothing, than receive something that contributes to the existing clutter in my home.

Well this is going to make a real lean Christmas

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, I got a ticket it in the mail.  When I saw the words “traffic violation enclosed” I winced because I knew that there was an extremely high chance that it was not me that was the driver at the time of the violation, seeing as how I barely get to drive my own registered vehicle these days, as my au pair uses it to do all of hauling of my kids to school and extracurriculars.  However, I was not upset with them because I’m sure it was an honest mistake, and it was more than likely to have occurred in the process of while they were taking my kids somewhere they needed to be.

Bringing the envelope into the house, my mind raced at what the possible fine was going to be, the last time I got a traffic camera violation, it was like $55, and when I got a school zone camera violation that was overturned on account of it not being a school day, I still saw that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $125~ish.  I hoped it was closer to the traffic camera, and not the school zone.

Turns out that the violation was that of passing a stopped school bus on a multi-lane road with a center turning lane, which I’ll admit that I had to stop and think about the rules on that one, but I probably would’ve stopped out of doubt.  And the time stamp confirmed that it was at a time in which it was the au pair taking my kids to extracurriculars, so it wasn’t my own doing; but seeing as how the car is registered to me, that’s who the ticket is directed at.

As for the violation, I imagine my face looking as close to possible as Jim Carrey’s The Mask as humanly possible when I saw the comma in the number: $1,000.  One thousand (fucking) dollars.

My knee-jerk reaction was that, this most definitely had to be a fake, a scam.  Even with the accompanying photo evidence of my car before and after the bus, this fine of a thousand dollars couldn’t possibly be right, especially seeing as how I’ve never had a violation of this nature in my record before.

So searching for it on my own on the internet, I find the city municipal site pretty quickly, and sure as shit, it’s no fake.  It’s an actual program, that’s been softly rolling out since like 2022, and any semblance of lower first violations all flew out the window as of July 2024, where the program rolled into the territory where all first violations are one thousand fucking dollars.

$1,000 for a school bus is absolutely draconian.  This is some Commonwealth of Virginia-levels of extreme punishment.  I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to where I can figure this out, but it doesn’t change the fact that the timing of it, and the flagrant intention of it is going to really ruin my life a little bit right now.  I’ve spent all of 2025 in some of the worst financial standing that I’ve ever been in my adult life, and I’ve been digging and fighting and persevering all year long, and just as I’ve been able to clear some debts right in time for the holidays, getting this ridiculously large fine just feels like I’m being kicked while I’m already down. 

This just reinforces the feeling I’ve had most of the year that I’m just this gigantic fucking punching bag for life’s cruel scenarios sometimes.

I get the whole idea of the program, and I am all about increasing safety for children.  I’m not butt-hurt over the notion of buses having cameras equipped to catch and penalize those who don’t follow the laws of bus safety, I’m just in a state of being flabbergasted that the fines are just so astronomically high. 

While venting my shock at the high violation cost, I came across this news story that echoes my general concern, and this quote is the best/worst/most ironic part of the whole thing:

A fine needs to get people’s attention, yes — but it shouldn’t be so high it’s impossible to pay,” (State Rep and who helped write the law Don) Parson said.

Additionally, this same person was quoted saying:

What we’re doing here is trying to protect children —and it is very important — but I also think $1,000 is too high,” he said.

I’m just in a state of disbelief, honestly.  This $1,000 fine is going to absolutely kill me.  No, I’m not going to lose my home or anything, but it’s not something I can just shrug off.  In all likelihood, it’s just going to be put on my credit card, adding to the debt that has been going in the wrong direction over the last two years, and it’s going to live rent-free in my head for a little bit.

I’m not going to shirk off the accountability and put it onto my au pair, because she got it while in service of my family, so beyond a cursory discussion to be careful of stopped school buses, I’m going to eat the burden, because the last thing I want is this to lead to her visa getting revoked because America sucks and I’m sure there have been foreigners deported for less.

But a $1,000 fine, this time of year, due by Christmas, absolutely blows.  I already stress over the obligation to buy gifts, but this basically consumes the vast majority of my gift buying budget.  Nobody is going to feel sorry for me, and I don’t think it’s really going to be accepted if I just nope the fuck out of gift giving outright because of this, and I’m trying really, really hard to keep my composure in light of this, and not let it ruin absolutely everything in spite of its extreme efforts.

I want to ask the rhetorical question on when will life start to get any easier, but the real question is if it ever really will at all?

The Dodgers are inevitable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the thing about writing about baseball playoffs: if you don’t write for a living and are financially obligated to have the time necessary to write about baseball at a moment’s notice, you’re probably not going to do so until you have available time to do so.  Which then makes you me, where I never have any time to write about things on a moment’s notice no matter how much I might think I have something that will read remotely readable, so you get to it when you can get to it.

However, the baseball playoffs go at such a rapid pace, if it takes me about 5-7 days to get to something, literally two rounds of the playoffs could have ended by then, which is sort of what did happen to me in this case.

At first, I wanted to write about Balakey Snell, and add onto how he clearly saves all of his effort for second half of the year, after he absolutely shut down the Reds in the Wild Card round.  The man has made a career of dodging work in the first halves of the seasons, with the two exceptions being the two years where he played with his balls on fire in order to win Cy Young Awards, which coincidentally aligned up with upcoming arbitration and free agent payday, to which once he got a contract, he’d loaf the first half of every year, faking injuries and suppressing his talent, and then going gangbusters the second halves of every year like clockwork.

But then the Dodgers won two games immediately to advance out of the Wild Card round, and onto the Phillies, where I wanted to write about the joys of watching two teams I dislike having to duke it out amongst each other, and when push came to shove, I’d have to support the Phillies over the Dodgers because frankly I don’t give a shit who wins the World Series – as long as it’s not the Dodgers.

Unfortunately, the Dodgers breezed through the first two games of the series, and put the Phillies on the brink of elimination, and mythical wife put game 4 on television as background noise, leading me to passively watch as I witnessed players on both teams flailing away pitifully as if it were me playing a video game, racking up strikeout after strikeout, and I actually found the game to be almost unwatchable, at how place discipline has clearly eroded tremendously over the last decade in which I’d gradually reduced how much baseball I watched.

I got triggered over how the TBS broadcasters, one of which turned out to be former Brave Jeff Francoeur, whom I’d had a contentious opinion of over the years, but the two of them just could not stop fellating themselves over Japanese rookie, Roki Sasaki, whom the Dodgers had decided to stash away entirely, unleashing him as their tentative playoff closer, which was working to great effect.

To Roki’s credit, he did pitch masterfully, pitching three perfect innings in relief, but at the same time the Phillies would have swung at kickballs being rolled on the ground by virtue of their complete lack of plate discipline, but it was obnoxious as fuck listening to the commentary of two dorks with the same gigantic weeb fetishes that MLB really loves  to push.

But then the Phillies were eliminated and it was onto the NLCS, in the blink of an eye.  In the first game, Balakey Snell pitched another gem, going eight, near-perfect innings, adding to the ridiculous talent suppression narrative, but before I could write about that, game 2 happened the following night where Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitches a complete game, the Dodgers win, and the sports world is jizzing all over the place at A Glorious Nippon baseball player demonstrating such brilliant mastery in the playoffs, much to my annoyance.

Meanwhile, golden boy Shohei Ohtani has been completely invisible for the second October in row, going 1-for his last like 20 or so at-bats, but nobody wants to dare hear ill about their demi-god.

I had a great analogy for a writing topic about how MLB feels like the League of Legends LCS scene where every team in every region came to the collective conclusion that they need to import as many Korean players onto their teams as they could, leading to a few years of hilarity where teams all over North America, Europe, China and even teams in Brazil, all had two Korean players on their rosters. 

And how MLB feels like it’s headed in that direction where teams are going to be scrambling to gobble up Japanese players because they’ll all buy into the notion that they need them in order to compete, and that the Dodgers are just one of the earliest teams to really exploit the system, much like teams like Fnatic, LMQ and G2 were early adopters of hoarding Koreans in LCS, before all teams eventually picked up on it and began poaching Koreans left and right.

But that brings us to the present, where the Dodgers won game 3 of the NLCS, where they now have a near-lock to make the World Series because no team except 2004 Boston Red Sox had ever come back from an 0-3 series deficit to win four in a row, and everything I wanted to make dedicated posts about are already in the past and not worth dedicating entire posts about anymore.

And all I really have to say at this point is the subject of this post – the Dodgers are inevitable.  They didn’t just buy themselves a loaded roster, they bought themselves a loaded roster, intelligently.  That’s the one major separator from them and every other team in baseball history that has thrown cash around like they were at a strip club, but resulted in no positive results.  Sure, some of them were victimized by the hot team, but this era of Dodgers has appeared to be hot team-proof.  No hot team or higher seed really makes a difference when they get loaded up into a short series with a team that has this much pitching depth, amassed effective relievers from other teams, and has this many available bats on their roster, all of which seem to be drunk enough on the Kool-Aid to not be letting any toxic egos into the equation.

I doubt I’m the only one who came into the playoffs with this sense of dread at seeing the Dodgers in, because most anyone who follows the game knows that they’re the team to beat, no matter where they were seeded going into it.  And sure enough, the Dodgers did what they were built to do, which is that they decimated the Reds and the Phillies, and have decimated the Brewers and by the time this day is over, could very well be en route to the World Series, yet again.

Like I said, I really don’t care who ultimately wins the World Series, but I really hope it’s not the Dodgers.  The fact that I would have preferred the Phillies over the Dodgers speaks volumes for those who know me.  If I had a preference, it’s the Seattle Mariners I’d rather see become champions for the first time in their franchise history, but I have no beef with the Blue Jays either.

But regardless of who comes out of the AL, I don’t like either of their chances against the amount of ammunition the Dodgers have, and they’re currently playing in a dominant manner that’s giving me some serious 2005 White Sox vibe, where their starters are just on another planet right now, delivering dominating performance one right after the other after another.  Even if they got completely bodied by the Angels all year.

This is most definitely one of those cases where I’d love to be wrong, and being right about an inevitable fucking Dodgers victory, will bring no joy whatsoever.

Oh, Atlanta #897

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Urbanize Atlanta: legendary gentleman’s club/piece of iconic real estate aka The Cheetah to become lame student housing for Georgia Tech

A long time ago, when I moved back out to the ‘burbs, I had a moment of feeling that I would miss living and/or working within the city.  There was a piece of me that felt some sort of importance to have proximity to the city in order to have a feel for the pulse of it, and that residing outside of it would make me lose touch with all the news and happenings within Atlanta city proper.

Sure, it is accurate to say that I’ve lost touch with the general, boots-on-the-ground minutiae of the city, but it’s still entirely possible to keep up with the general main happenings in and around the city by virtue of, the internet.  There are plenty of sites and outlets that do a good job of keeping me abreast to stuff like restaurants and events, not that I have a tenth of the extroverted desires to go out in the world anymore for the most part.

But when the day is over, I just don’t really give a shit anymore about needing to know much about what’s going on in the city like I used to.  I don’t miss going into the city, and I feel no real need to have a finger on the pulse of it anymore.  The pandemic only accelerated this detachment from things, but it’s like every time I do go into the city, I’m always surprised to see new things, and alterations to the general city skyline, primarily within a 2-mile radius around Georgia Tech; encapsulating Midtown, and the at some point-christened West Midtown neighborhoods.

In the past, I used to work pretty much right next to The Cheetah, right in Tech Square.  There was a break room that I used to sit in to eat my lunch that had a window that looked right out onto Spring Street, and The Cheetah, and not much else, because at the time there was only a giant-ass dead lot that was used for pay parking.

I’ve never really been one for strip clubs, since there’s little more of a turn off knowing that the broads prancing around trying to separate you from your cash, resent your existence by being there, and a headcase like me needs to have some degree of emotional connection in order for my wires to heat up.  But all the same, I always respected the existence of The Cheetah, as it was kind of an icon of the city, often in the same breath as other notorious locations in the city like The Clermont Lounge, Murder Kroger, Center Stage, Little Five Points, etc.

Plus, I really enjoyed it when I found a random $20 bill on the sidewalk while I was passing by, and it helped contribute to my very first iPad acquisition way back in the day.

But in spite of my general ambivalence for strip clubs, it did give me a case of meh-face when I learned that The Cheetah was next on the city’s chopping block in order to make room for more lame student housing.  Like, there are so many other dilapidated and/or useless plots of land remotely close to Georgia Tech that could make for land for student housing as opposed to sacrificing The Cheetah.  And it’s not like over the span of the last decade there aren’t like 5-6 other new student housing buildings that have popped up to house all these Georgia Tech nerds.

I dunno, it just leaves me feeling sour, knowing that Atlanta seems to slowly be sacrificing all of the little quirks and idiosyncrasies that made Atlanta, Atlanta, the way they keep cannibalizing shit with character for boring ass shit like moar student housing, egregiously priced condominiums, or corporate headquarters.  It’s like they’re going to run out of insufferably elevated words and names to use for all these soulless towers at the rate they’re going, and the last time I was in the city, for a wrestling show at Center Stage, there were literally two new apartment towers that had sprouted up that weren’t there just months prior.

When the day is over, I’m not going to lose any sleep over the demise of The Cheetah.  But it’s stuff like this that makes it easier to reinforce the notion that I don’t miss being in the city or needing to be close to the city, at all.  Almost all of the restaurants I used to like to go to are all gone, and little landmarks that I could always give people ten-cent tours over are all being razed for boring shit.  It makes me sad knowing that the city that I do rep is voluntarily forfeiting their character and charm, over the need for a bunch of useless and aesthetically soulless real estate that contributes very little to the long-term life of Atlanta.

Karate Kid: Legends – nobody asked for this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While coming home from a trip, I negligently forgot to bring my iPad which serves as absolutely nothing but a glorified Kindle, and I didn’t want to burn out my phone’s battery utilizing the shitty plane wifi.  However, I did remember that I had a set of wired headphones in my backpack, so I decided to actually capitalize on the in-flight entertainment and watch a movie to help chew up the flight time.

I ultimately landed on Karate Kid: Legends, because it aligned pretty well with my flight time, and this was the perfect class of film that is best seen on an airplane where I’m a captive audience, and I wouldn’t really want to watch this on my own time at home.  Despite the fact that I’m a big fan of the Karate Kid franchise in general, just about everything about this film gave me a feeling that it probably wasn’t going to be great, and as an airplane flick seemed like the most fitting place to watch it.

And almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the film was pretty much everything I thought it would be, this really mediocre ball of mediocrity that just barely did the absolute bare minimum of keeping my attention while feebly re-telling the tale of the Karate Kid for the umpteenth time to try and cater to another generation in spite of the fact that older iterations of the story do it just fine as long as modern viewers can get over their biases of things that appear older than them.

Like, the title of this post was exactly what I felt after watching Legends.  Nobody asked for this film to be made, and if anything at all, this does a massive disservice to the Karate Kid franchise as a whole, especially after Cobra Kai had built up so much equity after it’s wildly popular run.

I get that following Cobra Kai is an extremely unenviable position to be in, but there was always the option to just not make anything at all, at least for a little while, so that the mood of success and victory from CK could hang around for a little bit, before releasing something to re-ignite the fanbase.  But not only was Legends made completely unnecessarily, it was dropped in a manner of time that was frankly more detrimental to the KK universe than it would be beneficial.

Worst of all, it was just a severely mediocre story, even if it was mostly just a regurgitation of the original concept.  The general linear path of a KK re-telling was entirely there; protagonist moves to a new place, meets girl, gets beat up by local martial arts practitioner, trains up, topples adversary in a tournament, gains respect.  But the side quest of Joshua Jackson’s character being the former boxer who runs a pizza joint who borrowed money from the wrong people seemed wholly unnecessary and seemingly could have been completely cut without it really impacting the story was weird to me. 

And then of course when Jackie Chan comes to America to guide his former pupil, it was a bit cringeworthy to how forced and obvious it would be that shocker, he just so happened to know Mr. Miyagi too and naturally they were of course friends in a life long ago, which then loops in Daniel LaRusso, thus tying together the original series to Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu Kid, in the lowest of low efforts of connecting the series all together.

All while leveraging the set that was obviously put together on Netflix’s dime for Cobra Kai, which is probably the only justifiable reason to have released this as soon as they did, so that they could utilize existing sets instead of having to rebuild any shit, years later.

Worst of all, for a film called “Karate Kid” the action in the flick was pretty disappointing.  The main kid was a competent kung fu practitioner, but one bad scuffle and he basically abandons it for shitty Miyagi-Do style karate, before hitting paydirt when he blends the two styles together.  But fight sequences were pretty minimal, and for those who want to actually see some martial arts action, it’s massively underwhelming, with the tournament being 3-4 randos in weird alleyways, basketball courts and renovated bodegas before getting to his last boss which is on a rooftop like the last boss of the original Twisted Metal.

The point remains, this was a film that didn’t need to ever exist, but still happened anyway, which to me is the ultimate sign of a cash grab.  And fewer things seem to support that accusation than the absolutely lackluster performances from all performers in the film, from Jackie, to Macchio, even to Joshua Jackson and even Ming-Na Wen, whom seems to be the actress with the golden touch at how she’s somehow always able to get her finger into every notable franchise throughout her entire career.

This is where I say I’m glad that I watched this on an airplane, because I’d be really disappointed if I had seen this out in the real world, where I might have had a thousand other better things that I could’ve done with those 90 minutes.  But frankly, I still think I pulled the trigger on picking this one a little too preemptively, without at least seeing what other things I could’ve watched on Delta in-flight alternatively, but at least I got a little inspiration to make a post about it.

I guess we know who’s vying to be the next Spirit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Some friends and I were bullshitting on the topic of how Spirit Airlines is seemingly knocking at death’s door, about how if and when Spirit goes under, who takes their place in the airline pecking order, as the new budget airline that will absorb the lion’s share of ridicule and be the butt of all airline travel jokes?  Surely, one would emerge, seeing as how that’s just the natural order of nature, that if the weakest link of any category were to be cut off and killed, that someone would inevitably become the next in line.

The obvious choice would be Frontier, which is basically just Spirit Airlines but branded in green, as far as being a budget airline that lives on nickel and diming the fuck out of their customers, but for those who play it smart, a fairly serviceable option to get from point A to B.  And as someone who has flown both airlines on multiple occasions before, they really are pretty one and the same, and it would stand to believe that when Spirit goes under, those who already didn’t think Frontier was the ass-end of the airline industry, might not have any choice in the matter.

However, a surprising* contender appears to be emerging, as far as being a strong candidate to be the next Spirit, and that would be the once-reputable, once-universally beloved, once-proclaiming to love their customers, Southwest Airlines.

*or not, given the general direction of the company over the span of the last two years

Over the span of the last 12+ months, Southwest has made a tremendous amount of operational changes, with almost none of them being remotely beneficial to consumers.  First, it was them ceasing the whole open seating policy they had, which, to some was welcome, but to others, a sign of conformity and how they were taking one step closer to becoming another United or American or any other middling airline.  Then, in a move that definitely rose the ire of travelers, was the implementation of baggage fees, when for years prior, they boasted how bags flew free. 

And just over the last few days alone, Southwest has continued moving in conceivably the wrong direction, by announcing a large slew of route cuts, that will adversely affect lots of travelers from having direct options, and even had the audacity to try to spin that layovers were opportunities to see different parts of the country.  For as long as it took them to get their hooks into Atlanta, it looks like they’re already trying to reduce, with supposedly over 50% fewer flights this time next year, departing from ATL.

But one new development that is sure to draw the wrath of the internet as well as many around the country is their redefining of the large passenger policy, which was previously that large passengers could purchase a single seat, and get a second seat por gratis, if the flight could accommodate it, which was polarizingly applauded by many as a firm stance of allyship of inclusion of people of all body shapes and sizes.  Under their new policy, large passengers will have to preemptively purchase two seats if they know they will need them, and refunds of the second seat would be taken into consideration but not guaranteed, presumably on a case-by-case basis.

The latter is still probably better than what most other airlines offer, but it doesn’t take a genius to anticipate that the wrath of the internet is just going to see this as a sign of Southwest hates fat people, and when perception becomes reality, they become just like all the other airlines in the end.

The point is, Southwest is seemingly giving no more fucks about customers, contrary to the general brand reputation of theirs over the last two decades prior.  They’ve made it crystal clear that they are trying to profit in a competitive market, which is white people speak for, we know we’d probably be fine operating like we had been over the last half century, but we want to make more money now, so we’re going to say fuck the people and just do what everyone else is doing in order to achieve that.

I mean ultimately, that is the goal of every business in the world, to make money, but there are ways to do it and keep integrity and respect of the people intact, but that of course, often comes at a cost in itself, and when a bunch of old white guys run all these corporations, integrity and respect quickly fall to the wayside in pursuit of those extra nickels and dimes.

But it is funny how rapidly Southwest is selling their soul in order to go from successful company to asshole-rich successful company.  A part of me begins to wonder if Southwest isn’t deliberately tanking their company in one of those strange-but-typical modus operandi of businesses slashing expenses in a massive manner through liquidation and layoffs, in anticipation of a company sale or merger, and that Southwest is somewhere in a process of selling the company or getting absorbed by another airline.

And if so, a little more to be poured out for the airline industry, because within the guts of Southwest Airlines exists the remnants of AirTran, the budget airline that did succeed, and that I flew the shit out of, because they accomplished absolutely everything I needed out of an airline at reasonable costs.  Spirit and Frontier never could accomplish the things AirTran did, and AirTran did so well, they got assimilated into Southwest, who like Microsoft or Adobe basically did in so in order to kill a competitor.

Regardless of what happens to Southwest’s business in the future, if there was ever a bigger red flag of how they could become the next Spirit, look no further than the terminal incident out of Orlando, where a Southwest passenger went ballistic, and assaulted a terminal worker, as well as smashed up some monitors.  It’s funny because if this were actually Spirit, the lady would have been tazed and arrested within moments of the first aggression, but it’s like Southwest still has a lot to learn about unruly passengers, and she went unchecked for a while before presumably getting dealt with long after the cameras stopped rolling.

But if Southwest continues down this downward spiral, anticipate way more of this bullshit, and their gates will become the future places to meander to when you have a long wait before your flight after Spirit is gone, with hopes that you might see a street fight or a massive hot mess passenger meltdown.